eCommerce & SEO for a leading online wine retailer.

SEO / eCommerce

Founded in 1960, Hennings Wine has gone from strength to strength thanks to a personalised service, enviable product knowledge and delightful expertise.

The Hennings Wine proposition had evolved and expanded over time; their legacy website was failing to reflect the wider breadth of offering and was providing a sub-optimal user experience for mobile users. Moreover, it had been built on a bespoke platform which ultimately became needlessly cost-prohibitive to maintain and develop on and effectively had them locked-in with a single vendor.

A well rounded website

The new site needed to offer great flexibility for ongoing development, a more stable and easy to use system both for content management and running an online shop. It needed to accommodate content for new propositions such as the personal services such as private wine tasting events and the state of the art enomatic wine dispensing machines installed in-store.

The site also needed to seamlessly integrate with the stock/inventory management system employed within the business and which plays an integral role in order fulfilment.

Following this expansion of the brand and the opening of more retail outlets, Hennings Wine required a site which not only satisfied the needs of today’s digital market but one that was also a continuation of the pride and heritage found in-store. A site offering an authentic user experience and clear brand identity online.

The site was also fully responsive which provides a consistent user experience across devices – in turn significantly improving ease of use for mobile users.

A word from

Hannah / Digital Marketing Executive

“We worked with Hennings Wine to establish a clear roadmap for their organic search strategy. Following a carefully managed site migration and sustained ongoing campaign to optimise the site for search engines, we’ve managed to increase natural traffic by over 70% for most profitable terms compared to the previous year”

Comprehensive optimisation

Following a detailed scoping of the short and long-term functional requirements, to future-proof the website we opted to build it on the widely-supported, open-source WooCommerce framework for WordPress, on based on its flexibility and ability to customise as appropriate.

Integrated into the website was Sage to push orders automatically and incorporated a courier API integration for calculating shipping rates in real time.

We made a huge improvement to the speed of the site for both users and as a matter of SEO best practice, utilising Apache mod_pagespeed to provide an optimum page speed performance.

To mitigate losing valuable site visibility in search engine results, we conducted a rigorous SEO migration process. This involved benchmarking the performance of the legacy site, conducting a redirect mapping exercise (to account for the optimised URL structure of the new site), as well as implementing the appropriate e-commerce and goal/event tracking in order to compare pre/post-launch performance.

The results

We take pride in demonstrating a return on investment, and with a significant overhaul to the user experience, investment in conversion rate optimisation work and the re-platforming, we achieved some handsome results for Hennings Wine: